


Souls on Ice

by FlipSpring



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-31
Updated: 2012-07-31
Packaged: 2017-11-11 03:00:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/473763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlipSpring/pseuds/FlipSpring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Close up, her eyes are surprisingly ancient.</p><p>Gaunt cheeks, blue lips, shadowed eyes, scraggly hair of indeterminate hue. This is a girl who has spent cold nights on Death’s doorstep and crawled away in the morning.<br/>~<br/>“What’s your name?” she asks.</p><p>“I’m the God of Lies,” he responds. At this, she tips her head to the side, and a curious little smile turns up her thin, chapped lips. Humans. So easy to win.<br/>~<br/>“There’s a lot of red in your leger,” he said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Souls on Ice

_There lies a pair of souls on ice  
They gaze up blindly at the stars  
Their hearts are ripped, the shreds are sliced  
To drift between the voids afar  
With voices chained  
And memories charred_

**~**

It’s after a particularly infuriating escapade with Thor and his friends that Loki slips away between the gleaming cracks of Asgard, where shadows creep and the roots of the Yggdrasil weave and grow in starlight.

Simply put, Loki hid away to sulk.

It was a hunting expedition like any other, really, complete with the blind worship of Thor’s greatness, Thor’s prowess, Thor’s skill in the hunt. As though Loki had nothing to do with corralling the Lindwurm, frightening it with false images of a hundred stealthy warriors between the arching trees, as though Loki’s tactics weren’t just as effective as Thor’s hearty bellowing and hammering, as though Thor’s _better_ , because _he_ doesn’t need to resort to trickery, _he_ can just charge his way into the fray with all the forces of stupidity and none of strategy on his side, and make a mighty kill all the same.

“What went wrong with your trickery, Mischief-Maker?” said Volstagg good-naturedly when Loki went flying from the force of the Lindwurm’s tail to his face, “Just not quick enough, eh?”

And Thor roared, flying out of nowhere and crushing the mighty beast’s skull with a blow that shook tree limbs and left a cracked crater in the earth.

Loki pulled his helmet from his head, ears ringing as his mirages melted away into shadow. Thor’s friends praised Thor, and Thor took it with a thousand years’ of practice in the art of arrogantly accepting such praise.

Sif spared Loki a glance, snickered, and punched Thor in the shoulder.

“I shall be heading back, then,” said Loki.

Thor turned, gestured broadly, a grin on his face. “Won’t you help us bring the bones back, brother? The claws by themselves are a great burden.”

Loki laughed once, lightly, teeth in a grin to match Thor’s. “One you can carry easily, I’m sure. No, I’ll let you carry the spoils home, brother. After all, Asgard must know exactly who should receive the congratulations for the kill.”  
He turned and left for Asgard, swiftly and stiffly, leaving behind a rustle of undergrowth and nothing more.

And he heard Sif mutter, “Unmannerly and bitter, the clod.”

Either Thor didn’t hear, or chose not to respond.

 _I’m not bitter_ , thinks Loki, climbing carefully down through the roots of the Yggdrasil, placing hands and feet on the invisible grips between darkness and void. He reaches an empty ledge, and lowers himself lightly, sitting himself down on the rim and hanging his feet over a spray of nebulae and stars.

He leans his elbows on his knees and puts his jaw in his hands, kicking one foot slowly back and forth. _I’m not bitter _. Thor’s friends tolerate him, and admirably so. There are few people that Loki tolerates at all, and so he can appreciate the kindness when on the receiving end.__

But still.

Loki wants them to say, when they see him and Thor walking and conversing in the gardens, he wants them to say, _Ah there goes Thor! There goes Loki! The Princes of Asgard!_ He wants to ride beside Thor when they hunt. He wants their father to smile when he sees Loki, the way he smiles when he sees Thor. Small things, petty things, and they mean the realms to him, but that doesn’t mean he gets it.

Loki tries, he really does. There is no one in Asgard to match his skill in magic, no one to match his cunning or guile. But that’s not what Asgard is about, is it? It’s about how hard you can swing a sword, how brutally you can pummel your enemies, how loudly you can shout your opponent down, not how quietly and thoroughly you can deconstruct their argument.

It’s just that force and bluster aren’t Loki’s style. It’s best to do it quickly, in darkness, in stealth, and with skill. He would never choose force over finesse, and he can’t understand why everyone is so possessed with doing so.

Shaking his head, Loki backs away from the edge and gets to his feet, slapping shadows and stardust from his coat. He steps over to a fissure in the floor, leans down and runs his fingers through, and it lights up from deep within. He really could use a brief excursion to an alien world to take his mind off things, put the insignificance of it all into perspective. Someplace where the residents didn’t talk incessantly of Thor, didn’t judge status solely on how many stabs they could put into a dragon and live to tell the tale. Taking a deep breath, he steps in, and is sucked through a twisting maze of howling silence, pressing flashes of light and dark, until quite suddenly he squeezes through another tight gap and falls three full Asgardian storeys to the earth.

His impact leaves a large crater in the already beat-up road, and it’s enough to knock the air out of his lungs. Coughing to catch his breath, he straightens his sleeves and heads off into the ice.

It’s night, and dark; a thick cloud cover shields the stars above, and thick, windy snowfall makes it difficult to see what’s in front of him. He doesn’t feel the cold, though. Never did.

He passes the puny, decrepit houses one by one, boots crunching holes in an ice-encrusted slush of filth, and he gazes at the poverty of this frozen landscape, awed that any living thing would want to survive here. _Could_ even survive here. Up in Asgard the humans are commonly regarded as weak, plentiful creatures of their realm, always caught up in a chaotic fuss about nothing in particular.

But there’s a certain strength, Loki thinks, to struggling through real adversity, the kind of adversity that threatens imminent death, the kind of adversity that Asgard boasts in its tales but hardly ever faces now. Death in Asgard is rare, and is a more shameful event than anything, seeing as there are no great wars to die in anymore. On Midgard, though… On Midgard death is a real threat, ever imminent, ever inevitable.

The mortals have a funny relationship with death. He’s seen it on previous excursions to the planet. It’s as though they’re always playing this sarcastic game with the reaper, trying to win extra years, months, days, or just hours or _minutes_ (sixty “second” intervals of time completely alien in Asgard. Only mortals of such ephemeral lifespans can have use for them.), trying to scrape by and suck air and bite down chunk after chunk of tiny mortal life.

The amazing thing is that they are all well aware of death’s inescapability. They are aware of it but most of them put the idea aside, save it for another day, another minute. Their people know of their own inevitable oblivion, and they keep on fighting anyway.

Phenomenal, their strength.

Or stupidity? He still can’t tell the difference most times. Maybe there isn’t one.

And then the back of Loki’s neck prickles just slightly, and he turns on his heel, squints back down the blizzard-choked street, and just makes out the dark silhouette of a small person running away, one that would barely come up to his elbows.

He blinks, and it vanishes around a corner.

His teeth are suddenly bared in a grin. This is a game he can play.

When he finds the mortal he’s unsurprised to find her in poor condition. She’s but a child, and wouldn’t be but three or so centuries old if she were Aesir, but as for a human…

Close up, her eyes are surprisingly ancient.

Gaunt cheeks, blue lips, shadowed eyes, scraggly hair of indeterminate hue. This is a girl who has spent cold nights on Death’s doorstep and crawled away in the morning. A girl who has probably lost her parents, or their love, or both. A girl who gets by on intelligence and a cold, disillusioned, perspective of her situation. A girl whose trials are dreamed of by Asgardian children who have no idea the pain they’d have to endure to choose survival over death.

Some say pleasure wouldn’t exist without pain. Loki would disrespectfully disagree. Pleasure is pleasure and can be felt by anyone. Knowing true pain, living it, breathing it, sleeping intimately entwined in agony and choosing to wake up to it rather than subsiding into the pleasant quiet of oblivion… It’s not easy, that’s for sure. Pleasure breeds pleasure. Pain breeds tenacity. They don’t rely on each other’s existence, but awareness of pain begets a certain disdain and embarrassment and appreciation for pleasure. Strange.

There are thousands of these mortal children on this planet, Loki thinks, maybe millions. They die ignobly by each turn of their planet, in droves, dying of thirst, of hunger, of cold, of heat.

He kneels before her as she breaths shallowly, pressed up against a brick wall with frigid fear in her eyes, eyes that search his face and watch for threat with the wisdom that only the most lonely, lowly survivor in this landscape could accumulate, and he asks her the kind of question only a pampered god who has never faced her plight would ask.

“What is your name?”

Her eyes merely flicker back and forth between his, searching, watching, waiting.

Loki leans back, stares back. He raises one arm (she flinches), and snaps his fingers.

A ball of flame comes to life between them, and the girl inhales frozen air into her lungs so quickly that the shock makes her cough, wetly.

In this light, some clods of her hair shine red, but the bruised shadows under her eyes deepen and darken.

“Sit,” says Loki in the native tongue, pointing at the filthy, icy ground, which suddenly… isn’t, and the brick all but gleams with cleanliness. He follows his own advice and settles down, crosslegged, and raises his eyebrows at her.

“You’re being rude.”

She stares back at him wordlessly, but the suspicion in her gaze has been partially replaced by confusion and awe. Her eyes dart between his face and the hovering fire, now, and she narrows her eyes. Very slowly, she crouches down, knees pulled tight against her chest, and reaches her hands out to the fire.

“Don’t burn yourself.” He says, the benevolent god on the other side who has graced this puny, insignificant human with his presence on a whim. He sighs. Touching down on Midgard never fails to make Asgard (make him) feel powerfully arrogant and terribly insignificant, both at once.

“I think you have something of mine,” he says.

She finally speaks. “You think wrong.” And then she looks horrified at her own brashness. A thief and a liar. The two often go hand-in-hand. Loki wonders what he’s stolen lately.

“I propose a trade,” he says, and pulls from the air three items: a capped vial, a fur coat, and a loaf of steaming bread on a plate, and lays them out on the ground. “My knife returned for one of these.”

Her eyes are drawn to the food, but they glance around indecisively, and between every glance she looks up at his face, ever distrustful. He didn’t know what exactly happened to that trust, or how, but it’s always the same story, so he doesn’t ask.

“What’s in the bottle?” she asks.

“Medicine for your cough.”

She stops looking at the items, and begins to stare exclusively at his face. He can practically see the two million questions dance behind her eyes, but all she says is:

“I will take the coat.”

Loki is very, very surprised. It should’ve been the food. Immediate gratification, immediate grasping for the thing that will stave off pain and oblivion in the absolute shortest term. And the logic of it makes sense. Choosing a coat and then dying of hunger before you have to worry about freezing would be shameful and stupid. But why would such a strong survivor choose the coat?

“Very well,” he says smoothly, and the coat disappears and reappears around her shoulders. She jumps, then grasps at her chest, looks up, sees the gleaming silver knife in his hand, and her eyes narrow.

He’s reaching down to collect the vial and the bread when she moves, leaps at him, catlike, without hesitation, straight through the ball of fire and snatches up both the vial and the bread, and then flees past him into the frozen darkness, too quick to burn and too quick for him to feel surprised.

A thief and a liar.

Loki doesn’t pursue her. Why should he? A tiny human, a distraction, a little game. An insignificant speck of self-awareness floating in a silent sea of space. Nothing she may do with her life will have any impact on the greater scheme of things, surely? (Trick question, there is no such thing as the greater scheme of things, just brief and selfish pursuits of pleasure and self-worth. In that regard, he shouldn’t worry. She certainly won’t be a player in his life, it’s not like he’ll let her.) And now she’s gone. Instead, he puts out the flame and leans against the brick wall of the alleyway, the cold determination on her tiny, gaunt face seared into his mind.

He takes a brief nap.

When he wakes up, it’s overcast daylight, and the girl is back, wearing the coat and an expression of scrutiny. Warily, she keeps her distance, but the both of them should know just how pointless that little extra space is between them, if he really wants to hurt her.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he tells her. Her expression doesn’t change.

There’s a long pause and they stare at each other.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“I’m the God of Lies,” he responds. At this, she tips her head to the side, and a curious little smile turns up her thin, chapped lips. Humans. So easy to win. “Come here.”

And with that, she’s wary again.

“I have a gift for you, and a little truth.”

“Liar,” she says, with all the delighted conviction of a starved human child with the life expectancy of a mayfly.

He briefly inclines his head. Smiles. “The best liars know how to weave truth.”

She stares for a precious minute of her life. Then, very slowly, she scoots closer, but no closer than where his feet lay outstretched on the ground.

“So tell me,” she demands.

He obliges her.

“Humans are violent and self-centered, much like every living thing,” he says, and already she looks unimpressed, “They struggle, they live short lives, and they die without fanfare in the darkness.”

She interrupts, “I know.”

“Be silent. Now, you’re intelligent. You understand all this, you’ve seen more in your brief life than some gods see in a thousand years. You are a quick thief, a quick liar, but you’ll need to quicker to amount to anything. If you want to see the other side of this planet, thrive beyond this dying land of snow, you must seize those opportunities quickly, in darkness, in stealth, and with skill. You don’t want to end up as another nameless corpse, half frozen in a sewage ditch, like so many of your kind pass away, do you?”

She stares steadily at his face, and he can’t read her expression.

It’s cruel, what he’s saying to her. Coming down to a planet filled with struggle and pain, providing a beacon of light to a hopeless child, and for what purpose? His own amusement of course. A game to play, to remind himself that there are things far more significant and insignificant than his own troubles. A reprieve from the coddled and tortured life of the younger prince. Neither he nor she matter, in the grand, nonexistent scheme of things. But for now they can entertain one another.

He pulls the silver knife from within a fold in his jacket and turns it over in his hands. Runs a finger lightly along its edge, and it cuts, bleeds red. It’s fine craftsmanship, one of the best of its kind in the nine realms, with a blade so sharp you can almost cut yourself just looking at it.

He flips it in his hand, holds the handle out to her, and she hesitates a whole human second before taking it.

“Use it well.”

She stares up at him with those ancient eyes, eyes that haven’t yet seen a decade but are filled with such focus and intelligence and pain.

**~**

The God of Lies stands in a glass cage, stares out at the human woman who has come to interrogate him.

It has been a short time for him, a long time for her.

_That’s how time runs: steadily, quickly, and massively all at once._

Everything has changed, and whatever heart he might have had, it’s been long snuffed out by a curious emotional concoction of equal parts apathy and hatred.

She comes to interrogate him, and it’s something about her eyes that speaks familiarity.

_I know you. The nameless girl. Thief and liar._

Ancient.

Eyes that hold impossible amounts of insight for such a fleeting lifespan.

Eyes that have seen and experienced and dealt pain of the worst kind.

The ancient eyes of a sick, starving child in a frozen, hopeless land.

He wonders briefly if her poor human memory is enough to remind her of the blizzard night and overcast day.

_Probably not. Turns out we did, are, affecting each other’s lives beyond our brief acquaintance. Who’d have thought?_

What with everything, he’s surprised when he finds out she’d taken his advice.

A Fighter for Good, she is, but he knows her darkness. He can see it in her eyes.

She’d grown.

He wrenches her, or thinks he does, and she wrenches back with contempt.

The liar and a thief.

“There’s a lot of red in your leger,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> This one night I was swept with the image of Natasha as a child in the snow and Loki as a bitter god. And I just had to write it.
> 
> So. Yeah. Maybe it's not horrible, I don't know.


End file.
